Swedish

Swedish is the main language of of the population (92.4% in the Åland autonomous province), down from 14% at the beginning of the 20th century. 47% of Finnish citizens can hold a conversation in Swedish , of which most live in the southern and western parts of Finland. It is a North Germanic language, closely related to Norwegian and Danish; as a subbranch of Indo-European, it is also related to other Germanic languages such as German and English and (more or less distantly) to languages as diverse as Hindi, and Russian.

Swedish was the language of the administration until the late 19th century. Now it is one of the two national languages, with a position equal to Finnish in most legislation (but the working language in most governmental bodies is Finnish). Both national languages are compulsory subjects...Read More